New AMD “Volcanic Islands” And “Pirate Islands” GPUs Revealed

AMD’s next generation GPUs have been detailed and we now know they will be called Volcanic Islands and Pirate Islands. Volcanic Islands is the high end GPU stack of the next generation and features the high end single and dual GPU configurations.

The highest end part is dubbed Hawaii followed by Maui and Tonga. AMD will debut the HD 9000 series Volcanic Islands GPUs in Q4 of 2013 and TSMCs 20nm node process is expected to be at the heart of these new GPUs – though this is not confirmed. We do know that we will will definitely see GCN 2.0 and Direct X 11.1.

AMD will then succeed “Volcanic Islands” GPUs with “Pirate Islands” GPUs at some stage after in late 2014 or early 2015. These will be made up of Bermuda, Fiji and Treasure Island GPUs and will definitely be based on the 20nm node.

According to the report, AMD might ditch the HD XXXX naming convention and use a Radeon 1xxx Rx naming system. The next series would then be called Radeon 2xxx Rx, and so on. It is not known if this is a simple replacement of the HD prefix, so R10-9970/9970-R10 for example, or if AMD could opt for new naming structures using the RX pre-fix to denote market segmentation. This would be similar to their APUs where A10 represents the best and A4 the worst.